@ Fugger and Pedro...The two of you are using (or have used) 6800 Extremes. Do you notice when first booting after making bios changes that the indicated bus speed is off when using a multiplier other than factory...i.e on an E6600 if I set FSB to 1850 as an example (462mhz effective) at factory multi of X9 it boots and shows in the post screen 462 X 9 (4158mhz net). If I change the multi to X8 the post screen shows 518 X 8...change to X7 and the post screen shows 593 X 7 and change to X6 the post screen shows 692 X 6. The bios is trying to maintain the overall system frequency od 4158mhz by adjusting the bus which in turn creates some crazy FSB numbers...

I think this is why we are seeing the "dead spots" which fugger has mentioned (and I too have seen plenty) as the system simply cannot boot at whatever frequency it is generating. There is a huge range that simply will not post without going to safe defaults so you can't see what the bus speed is that it's trying to use during boot. 1850mhz happens to be one that shows the crazy speeds during post but will not boot to windows on my system...

Just curious if the unlocked multiplier on the 6800 generates the same results.